Julia Hartz: We've been married for five and a half years and we met in 2003 at a mutual friend's wedding. I was working for MTV on little show called Jackass.

Kevin was in San Francisco starting his second startup, Xoom, and his friend from Stanford married my boss.

In the church there were two sides, one of nerds and one of too-cool-for-school MTV kids. We were the product of that union. We sat next to each other during the ceremony and we hit it off.

When did you know you wanted to start a business together?

JH: We knew we wanted to start a company together before we lived together. We were literally unpacking my boxes the same day we were setting up saw horses using doors for desks in a little conference room.

When I think of those early days I think of the wall of Cup of Noodles and the wall of wedding invitations on our desk. Because at the same time we were trying to launch a company we were also mailing our wedding invitations.

KH: When Julia moved to San Francisco from Santa Monica she was looking for a media/tech position. Julia started interviewing around and got all sorts of interesting offers; I was transitioning out of a full-time role at Xoom.

We figured out Julia has some really great complementary skills, and maybe Julia and Renaud — our third cofounder and CTO — maybe the three of us could embark on something together. The three of us clicked very well.

How did you decide on Eventbrite?

KH: In the original business of Xoom, my business partner and I built all these payment applications. We built seven or eight on top of PayPal's API just as people are now building on top of Facebook's.

When I stepped out of Xoom we had these other rudimentary payment services running and what became Eventbrite was actually growing on its own with no one running it. We thought, "This is really interesting, lets spend a couple quarters on it and see if it fleshes out."

JH: I never considered myself an entrepreneur until I met Kevin and he made it look so easy. I think it was his persuasiveness that got me to take the leap form a comfortable corporate position to a non-paid tech one. He helped me tap into a passion I didn't even know I had.

Were you confident you'd be able to work together?

KH: The beginning of Eventbrite was very experimental in a lot of different ways. We didn't know if this was the right approach to ticketing. We didn't know if the market existed. We were also engaged so it was an experiment in whether or not we could work together. We kind of treated it as a trial — a run-through.

My advice to other couples who want to become entrepreneurs is to test it out first. We always had escape routes. We said we'll try it out for the first quarter, or the second quarter and check in. Because what you don't want to do is sacrifice your relationship.

So we had these check-in points to say, "Wow, this is still working." Have those exit routes. You don't want it to blow up. If it isn't working you want to make a conscious decision to go off in different directions.

You initially bootstrapped Eventbrite. What advice do you have for couples who can't afford to both be out of work at the same time?

KH: We have always been frugal in nature but we did have the ability to both work full time and not take salaries for a significant amount of time. We decided to take a bootstrapping route.

Some general advice for any entrepreneur is to moonlight. You have a paycheck coming in during the day and a lot of great businesses have been created on the side. Show some progress, set some goals. Say, "In 3 months or 6 months we want to be able to have a working beta with X many users," and demonstrate you can get to that before you make that next commitment. Or generate revenue or find investors before you jump out of the nest of your job.